Some’s Hot, Some’s Not 08/17/11

Just how much money do they want to spend?……At the board of judges July meeting, all the Fort Bend County judges passed a resolution to wit: Discuss and take appropriate action concerning the possibility of car covering for county elected official parking.

The elected officials they are talking about is themownselves. And the place where they want to build the covered parking? Why it’s the new Justice Center across the street from the jail on Ransom Road where Fort Bend taxpayers have just spent around $75-80 million to have all the courts in one building. That includes a next-door, several-story parking garage, which allows plenty of covered parking for judges, juries and all matter of employees.

The county wasn’t able to give employees a raise this year, and yet we have judges who want a cover for their cars, which they probably don’t park in their garages at home in the first place.

It would cost about $400,000 to pave some more land and cover it for their cars.

There have been complaints that the parking garage is always full. This may be the case but if the judges would agree to call panels of jury on more than one day a week, there would be sufficient parking.

Then the judges point out there is not sufficient security in the parking garage. If they would take off their “state judge” license plates from their vehicles, it might be safer. Nobody would know who drove what vehicle.

And if the Justice Center parking garage isn’t safe right across from the sheriff’s department, I don’t know what will be.

A side note to every judge being in the new Justice Center is that all judges are now housed in the same building and any judicial antics are exposed to all there. Judge Bud Childers, who we have written about before, is showing his true self. The way I heard it, he came storming out his courtroom, black robes flying, making him look for all the world like an avenging hound of hell, busting into another judge’s office and telling them to get quiet because it was disturbing him!

Judge Childers, who we’ve often called “Bud Lite” has heretofore been in a building all by himself. Now his peers will get to witness his actions.

Water rationing…..Looks like all the cities are getting around to mandatory water rationing. It’s about time and I think it should have been done earlier. Most have had voluntary water rationing and we know how that works.

Pumping all of the water from the ground without a replenishing rainfall causes subsidence and I’ve already noticed a cracked tile in my kitchen. I suspect my foundation is sinking.

This rainfall amount is about the worse I’ve ever seen in Fort Bend. I lived through the drought in West Texas in the 50s when my daddy burned through all our college money trying to keep his cows alive. It resulted in my mother eventually having to open a beauty shop to send my brother and me to college. (Heaven forbid that we ever did a lick of work!) Of course, there wasn’t a lot of jobs for young people then either. It was before the fast food era.

We had such dust storms we had to hang wet sheets on our doors and windows to protect us during the worst of it. We could see the dust storms coming across the flat land, big red or black swollen clouds according to which way the wind was blowing. I swear I saw Lubbock blow by one day.

I remember when the drought was finally broken. My daddy stayed up all night, eating popcorn and looking out the window. I asked mother why he stayed up all night and she said he was afraid if he took his eyes off the rain, it would stop. It took us a long time to recover from that era, both our land and us, mentally.

I keep hearing…..disturbing things about the city justice system in Stafford. A person called me this week, and it’s not the first complaint I’ve heard about this very thing, and was disturbed that he had asked for a jury trial in traffic court and it had been reset four times. That makes me and the complainant think they are just trying to wear him down and get him to pay the fine and go away.

This person said not only was the judge insulting, but the prosecutor was as well. This person told me he had to take off work every time he had a court date, only to get there and it be reset. The person said they would never spend another penny in Stafford and tell their friends the same. This person said he knew that times were tough and cities were trying to increase revenue, but he said the ticket he got was so egregious he decided to fight it and he had the video to prove his case.

This person was so upset about the latest reset, he looked me up on the newspaper website and called me about it.

Like I said, this is not the first time I’ve gotten this complaint.

Kudos…..You probably read in this newspaper that Classic Chevrolet recently won some big award as the “dealership of the year.” I want to take a little space right here to tell you about how Don Kerstetter took over that dealership, which had a terrible reputation when it went by another name. A relative young man, Don still had lots of experience in the car business, and he took over that dealership determined to make it successful.

He moved his family here and put a lot of hard work and determination into doing just that and it has yielded the right results. Don always has a happy smile, always is upbeat about not only his car dealership and the car business, but Fort Bend County in general. Anything you ask him to do, he tries to make it happen and usually does.

I’m just saying that in a few short years, he has revived a dealership that was mired in bad feelings and he has been able to get the whole community pulling for him. And why besides hard work and determination? Because he is just a nice person.

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